George McGovern is an honorable, clear-thinking American for whom the only ideology is simple, unselfish service to country. In this short, quick read of a book, he reminds us what true American values are: Big-heartedness, generosity, help for those in need, ingenuity, hard work to get ahead, a decent respect for every human being, and bipartisan pragmatism.
Senator McGovern is a decorated war hero (a bomber pilot who survived dozens of missions in WWII), a member of the Kennedy Administration, and by his own account a "stand-in" presidential candidate who ran against Nixon after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. He draws on his rich personal knowledge of 65 years of American politics to place the current radical-right GOP in historical perspective as one of the worst political developments ever to happen in America. "We are," he reminds us, "a nation in which fear and paranoia run deep. Since the Pilgrims made landfall in 1620, we have burned so-called witches at the stake, hauled Japanese-Americans to internment camps, and blacklisted people who we labeled Communists." In postwar history, it is the Republicans who "have fomented popular fears to their best advantage." The GOP is the party of demagoguery and playing dirty: McCarthyism, the "southern white strategy," Willie Horton, ginned-up WMDs and specters of mushroom clouds in Iraq, Swiftboating, and the Socialist-Muslim-Kenyan nonsense.
When Republicans are elected to public office, they overreach, ignore facts and common sense, and run roughshod over the country. The Patriot Act invades our privacy. The Homeland Security department is a bloated "behemoth that now has more than 200,000 employees and a $42 billion budget." It upsets McGovern to "see an elderly woman trying her darnedest to comply with these ridiculous rules, as if she could possibly be harboring an explosive in her toothpaste." The Republicans deregulated the financial industry, ran up huge deficits on unpaid-for wars, and caused a near-collapse of the nation's economy, and then not only refuse to take responsibility, but want even more of the same. "I am sickened," he says, "by the idea that instead of working alongside President Obama to solve [these] problems in a bipartisan way, congressional Republicans are trying to . . . unseat him . . . regardless of the cost."
McGovern ridiules the GOP obsession with tax cuts and the claim that lower taxes mean higher growth: "[During the Eisenhower period], the tax rate on the wealthiest was 91 percent--and GDP grew by 3.67 percent. Under Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of tax cutting and the Republican Party, GDP grew by only 3.47 percent. If a tax rate as high as 91 percent didn't stall the economy, why would a 36 percent rate do so?
He was opposed to both the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and points out that the techniques of false patriotism were identical among those who supported these wars: "[A] lot of people who beat their chests have never been near a military plane or a battlefield; they've never heard a bullet pass an inch above their skulls. They've never seen a buddy in arms gasping his way to death. Sometime in the late 1960s, as I had the floor trying to make the case against our continuance in Vietnam, a fellow senator stood up and said, 'I stand with our troops.' I said, 'You're not standing with our troops. They're in Vietnam. You're in the Senate, with air-conditioning, mahogany paneling, and pages to run your errands for you.' " McGovern has watched our government send almost exclusively working-class kids off to die in wars, "while the kids who have enjoyed the most from our society are the least likely to serve," and suggests that "if upper-middle-class kids were being drafted out of Harvard and Smith we might never enter unwise wars like those we're in now or were in for so many years in Vietnam."
"What it Means to be a Democrat" is not a heavily-footnoted academic analysis, a journalistic work based on hundreds of sources, or an ideological tract. It is the final salute of a 89-year-old who knows firsthand that our nation has been gravely damaged by the radical right, and who wants to remind us to return to our true ideals.
